Nottingham Trent University, 10 June 2016

2nd Call for Papers for an Edited Collection on the writing of Marilynne Robinson

As part of the Manchester University Press series, Contemporary American and Canadian Writers, this volume will chart recent and emerging critical opinion on the celebrated author, Marilynne Robinson. Having issued an earlier call for papers, the editors now seek proposals that specifically address the following areas:

Robinson and her contemporaries;

Robinson’s nonfiction writing;

Robinson and race;

Robinson’s role as a public intellectual;

Literary review culture, prize giving, and the production of “literary” fiction via the Iowa Writers’ Workshop;

Robinson’s engagement with history, particularly the ongoing relevance of the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and/or Civil Rights Movement to her work;

Robinson and US intellectual history.

Please email abstracts of no more than 300 words with your institutional affiliation and brief bio to robinsonsymposium@gmail.com no later than 15th September 2017.

All chapters will be subject to a blind peer review process and full details and submission guidelines will be provided to contributors on acceptance of proposals. Any queries should be sent to the editors at robinsonsymposium@gmail.com.

On 10 June 2016, Prof. Bridget Bennett, Prof. Sarah Churchwell, and Prof. Richard King took part in a discussion as part of the final session at the Marilynne Robinson symposium. You can listen to that discussion here, as well as the lively question and answer session that followed.

Jennifer Daly looks back at Robinson’s first public reading in Belfast on April 20th.

“To tell the thing that has not been told…”

Phase Two of your intrepid symposium team’s plans to solidify Robinson Studies as a legitimate topic saw the three of us participate in a panel at the recent IBAAS conference at Queen’s University Belfast. The panel was a resounding success and opened up some interesting discussions on everything from orphans and scary forests to questions of identity formation and recurring images of graves. Less than two weeks later on April 20th, Marilynne Robinson herself delivered the Institute of Theology’s annual McCosh Lecture also at Queen’s. This was Robinson’s first visit to Northern Ireland and so (untypically) beautiful was the weather that she was moved to declare that “Belfast in the sunlight is a paradise.”

Robinson’s lecture, on the topic of religion and American literature, was wide-ranging. Covering everything from the Declaration of Independence (noting that they probably didn’t have a focus group when they wrote the phrase “we hold these truths to be self-evident) to Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty, she suggested that religion plays a fundamental role in shaping American fiction and how writers come to their writing. Robinson spoke at length on the idea that a national literature “does a great deal to define a country,” claiming that much of American literature was influenced by social movements; that finding and dwelling on what is rotten in society has become a habit for American writers, creating a literary tradition of asking for change. Robinson also noted that in the contemporary period, there is a tendency to think that religious thought is inappropriate, and asked if one can really exclude religion from the ways in which people are represented in literature.

The Q & A that followed the lecture was particularly lively, and touched on numerous not-always-related topics. Inevitably, she was asked about the current election cycle in the US, which elicited the sharp observation that “having come out of difficulty is a credential for American politicians…they’re almost dragging log cabins around behind them.” In response to the question of whether she Feels The Bern, Robinson noted that she wished that Hillary Clinton was a more pacific figure and stated her own belief that President Obama’s main goal was to establish a state of peace as the norm for America.

Other topics included what she thinks of the “Christian writer” label she is so often tagged with (many writers are Christians, but they don’t use religious references as she does); what was her way in to Calvin (teaching a seminar on Moby Dick); the admission that she does not keep notes or a journal; will there ever be a film of Gilead (rights are currently being negotiated with a “major” director, but she declined to say who). Robinson also spoke movingly about her experience as a teacher and the promise present in students.

The final question put to Robinson was about the value of education and the place of the humanities within the university. Considering the current debates raging within the academe, she began by asking if it is always appropriate to interpret change as decline. She expanded on this by noting that there are always battle-lines in society, and currently the people who control budgets dictate the reality that the rest of us have to live in. Robinson suggested that universities are in a defensive posture, preferring to prepare workers to fuel the economy when the real purpose is to carry forward the genius of civilisation. She ended her remarks by stating that “there is such a thing as the enabling of the mind, and we should be proud of that,” and it is with this lofty goal in mind that we turn our attention to Nottingham on June 10th.

Anna Maguire Elliott continues our series of blogs from the symposium organisers.

In September 2015, President Barack Obama, made a trip to Iowa to meet with Marilynne Robinson for a lengthy conversation, which was adapted into two interviews for The New York Review of Books. In these interviews, Obama sets their discussion apart from his usual visits to speak with local people, which typically involve “trying to drive a very particular message,” and instead frames their conversation as a more relaxed discussion “with somebody who I enjoy” about “some of the broader cultural forces that shape our democracy and shape our ideas.” (1). The idea that the President of the United States would participate in a published interview without a “particular message” is, of course, highly questionable. So what are these “cultural forces”, and why does he choose to discuss them with Robinson? What, in turn, does this say about Robinson’s work, and her position as an American writer?

In their discussion, Obama both emphasises the importance of her work in the current climate of financial crisis and globalisation (2), and he positions her writing as a moral centre set against the materialism of the public sphere: in contrast to “big systems where everything is all about flash” (5), he says, her work embodies “homespun virtues” (4). He briefly defines these virtues as “hard work, honesty and humility” (4), but the vague nature of these “virtues” is less interesting than his more lengthy exploration of their “homespun” origins. Obama suggests these values are recognisable in small towns “everywhere across the country” (5), and he notes they: “sounded really familiar to me when I think about my grandparents who grew up in Kansas.” (4). In referencing his maternal grandparents, rather than either his Kenyan family or more cross-cultural Hawaiian upbringing, Obama reinforces a message of morality that draws on white motherhood, family and home, and suggests Robinson’s work as part of a narrative of white, female, middle-class domesticity.

Although drawing on the values of his Kansas grandparents may be a logical reference, given that Obama was raised primarily by them and his mother, it also marks the construction of a politically astute narrative that relates his own to heritage to that of his white midwestern interviewee and likely predominantly white middle class readership in The New York Review of Books. The domestic ideal uses the white family to establish a model of the home as nation against a foreign other. As Amy Kaplan explains: “domestic has a double meaning that not only links the familial household and nation but also imagines both in opposition to everything outside the geographic and conceptual border of the home.” (581). These “homespun virtues” have typically been drawn on to expel a foreign other when the white American home has felt itself under threat in times of national instability.

Obama’s reading of Robinson’s work as representative of the morality of the white American home then positions her in a tradition of writing with the female domestic novelists of the nineteenth century. Their meeting, in fact, recalls the legendary (and quite possibly mythical) meeting of President Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In this encounter, Lincoln is said to have acknowledged the profound impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the start of the Civil War (Douglas 19). Whether historical fact or not, the repeatedly told story of their meeting marks a popular construction of Stowe’s writing as a moral centre of familial and national values set against commercial materialism, in much the same way as Obama reads Robinson’s work. While Stowe’s novel is presented as galvanising the nation against a materialistic system of slavery, she infamously also advocated at this point for black emigration to Liberia, and thus reinforced the white domestic ideal. Although not infused with the racism of the nineteenth century, Robinson’s, and also Obama’s, relationship to white domesticity is similarly complex.

To a certain extent Robinson meets some of Obama’s expectations as a paragon of “homespun virtues.” In the current, unstable political climate, she suggests that she finds optimism about American citizenship in the people she speaks to at her book signings. She is encouraged by: “how earnest they are, how deeply committed they are to sustaining people they feel close to or responsible for and so on – there they are, the people that you think of as the sustainers of a good society.” (2 9). Robinson’s references here to sustenance and the responsibility for others depict classic domestic ideals of family: of nurturance, and of caring for those who are “close.”

However, Robinson also proceeds to deconstruct the domestic ideal of the nation-as-family, as she asserts: “we have created this incredibly inappropriate sort of in-group mentality when we really are from every end of the earth, just dealing with each other in good faith.” (3). Here Robinson suggests an ethic-of-care that operates across difference, rather than through a dualism of white home set against “sinister other” (1). Similarly, in their conversation, Obama argues for a “more expansive” (3) sense of community. Locating Robinson’s work within the framework of American domesticity therefore functions to critique, rather than to reinforce, a white home/racial other dichotomy. The nation as home remains a powerful metaphor but the terms of inclusion into the American family have shifted and transformed, and drawing on the ideal of the white home cannily allows Obama to add a conservative legitimacy to his argument for a more inclusive understanding of American society.

Despite using their conversation to call for an expanded understanding of the ethic-of-care, Obama’s positioning of Robinson as an embodiment of the traditions of white middle class motherhood remains troubling. His reference to the “homespun virtues” of her work is problematised further when considering the definition of homespun as plain or unsophisticated. Values of nurturance and care have typically been denigrated as emotional rather than rational, and when morality is championed over materialism, it is often at the expense of intellectual value. The undervaluing of the intellectual sophistication of women’s writing about the home has been, and continues to be, one of the greatest challenges to a full appreciation of this work.

To my mind, the conversation between Robinson and Obama represents the continuing significance of domesticity as a “cultural force” that shapes the American nation. The “particular message” of their discussion is a carefully crafted one, of revision and transformation to the concept of the American home and family. Against the background of Donald Trump’s desire to turn the metaphorical walls of the American nation-as-home into a literal one, across the Mexican border, this is an important, inclusive message. However, their conversation also reinforces the association of Robinson, as a woman writer, with a set of moral values established within the home and is thus simultaneously limiting on the terms of gender. Their discussion is representative of the challenge for women writers who wish to draw on the ethics of care and nurture that have shaped domestic relationships, without remaining trapped within the walls of the house.

This is the first in a series of posts written by the conference committee, which we hope will start a conversation about Robinson’s fictional and nonfictional work that will continue through our panel at the IBAAS conference in April and into our symposium at NTU on Friday 10th June.